This post is the fifth in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop (Wikipedia) as a member of the 2008 class. I’ll talk about my third week at the workshop, when Cory Doctorow (Wikipedia, Twitter; freely downloadable recent novels Little Brother and Makers) instructed. Here’re Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the series. In Part 4 I discussed writing my story “Glenn of Green Gables” and ended with a cliffhanger: aliens had just broken into our space station hull.

As mentioned before, Clarion West is stationed in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, but at the same time it replicates the Earthly city below. I think this Miévillean metaphysic serves in part to shield Clarionites’ dubious deeds from those who might not understand what happens when writing workshops (rightfully) push people to revise their stories: their fictional stories and moreso their personal identity ones. In the space station, as narratology becomes conscious craft, students confront fictional characters who battle through fictional plots, and confront seventeen other writers, plus a vaunted instructor, each of whom are battling through their personal plots — and everyone winds up using the manuscripts as materiel.

With their laptops students type out art, trails to their selves; the art becomes in the classroom terrain for proxy wars over personal identities — and over the group’s identity, too. Everyone in the building is at once enemy and comrade. Reality shows would pay to sell some of the behavior that bubbles up. Caught in it, students lean on each other for support. That requires privacy; thus the mystery of the workshop’s location. Again: the experience requires privacy. To have four laptops — writers’ trusted weapons — stolen by aliens breaking in … an invasion!

I’m not clear on the actual details of the heist, none of us were, though we scried far and wide for the aliens, and sent many spaceships chasing after. We were all as one laptop-less ragtags, but within forty-eight hours we were high-fiving each other — because to our quick rescue came an advocate of privacy shielded with a sheen of transparency, in other words, that frenetic pirate known as Cory Doctorow.

Info he finds useful he boomerangs, and so when he learned aliens invaded just prior to his arrival, he donated his instructor’s pay toward laptop replacements and posted the following on Boing Boing:

Clarion West, the famed Seattle science fiction workshop, has suffered a terrible theft: four student laptops were stolen yesterday. Clarion West (like Clarion in San Diego) is a grueling, six-week intensive boot-camp for science fiction writers. Students often quit their jobs and save for years to attend and it goes without saying that they can hardly absorb the cost of a new laptop in the middle of the workshop.

I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow to teach the third week of the workshop and I’m keenly aware of the chaos this will have wrought on the students. The workshop’s organizers are soliciting donations — either hardware or cash — to get the students up and running. The workshop is incorporated as a 501(c)3 charity, so any donations are tax deductible.

I am donating all of my teaching fee to the fund. I hope that some of you will be moved to chip in whatever you can afford, to help fund the instruction of the next generation of great science fiction writers.

Clarion West received enough donations to replace all stolen laptops. I wonder which literary fiction communities could boast the same (I’m actually asking!).

That week, in addition to the invasion, I was shaken “as if with ague,” which is the writerly cliche for describing someone tremoring.

Except there was no as-if subjunctive for me: all week I had a constant fever registering over a hundred, and I had a cough, too. I think the illness was brought on by too much exercise (I ran in the mornings). Thankfully the administrators (Neile Graham and Les Howle) gave me nothing but the kindest help. My memories of Cory’s week, though, remain hazy.

Still I can report some of Cory’s instruction. An advocate of privacy, I said; Cory, who’s associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Twitter), has a number of controversial views not just on privacy but also on piracy, file-sharing, DRM and media industries, more. Some of his afternoon lectures covered his digital ideology. I remember him as a fast-talking firebrand.

All the same he had a sensitivity about him that I don’t see many mention. For example, he was the only instructor who in the one-on-one sessions made a point of asking how we were doing emotionally, aside from the writing portion of the workshop; that thoughtfulness probably was in part due to his having attended Clarion East as a student in 1992. He definitely understood how stressful and transforming the entire experience is, how it requires the privacy and the care that can come with a good group’s special, monastic space (station).

In one lecture Cory gave us a seven-point formula for plotting: create 1) a character 2) in a place 3) with a problem 4) who intelligently overcomes obstacles, 5) and as things get worse, 6) conflict by necessity comes to a climax, 7) after which there’s a denoument.

If I’m not mistaken, Cory portrayed this formula as universal, which with if so I take issue. The formula doesn’t account for certain types of good stories that go under-represented in science fiction & fantasy: stories with unreliable narrators, trapped protagonists who don’t escape into heroic stature — they’re the kind of characters who remind us, as we watch their ironies, of just how much sway our environment has over our lives, and how unreliable information is, no matter how much we try to route around those bugs/features of reality.

As I mentioned in Part 4, most (all?) my classmates in the space station, along with our Week 2 instructor (Mary Rosenblum), totally loved my Week 2 story (“Glenn of Green Gables“); Cory was among the readers who didn’t. Years later I can count the non-fans on one baffled hand. Cory argued Glenn isn’t like-able since he doesn’t solve his problems intelligently. My rejoinder, however unnecessary it is now (people are entitled to their opinions!), is the one a fellow Clarionite suggested: Glenn is an emotionally intelligent problem-solver because he bravely sticks to his lonely love for ol’ Anne Shirley despite increasingly sinking circumstances…

Maybe I seem bitter, and for a time I did feel a bit (byte?) uselessly resentful. But that’s not the point, not me; the point is to tell you (especially future Clarion students) what I experienced. So: there were three male instructors my year, three female. My father is and has been, uh, conspiciously absent from my life, and so the less mature 2008 version of me unconsciously scrutinized Paul Park, Cory, and Chuck Palahniuk in a way he didn’t the three other instructors (Mary, Connie Willis, Sheree R. Thomas). I regarded the men’s instruction as having a sort of paternal absolutism to it.

Now that I’m more of an “active protagonist” in my “real” life (thanks in no small part to Clarion West and Seattle), I’ve intentionally challenged myself to write short stories in different and also more traditional ways, and for that, Cory’s obstacle-tackling pointers have proven handy.

One application: while plotting with point 5 — “as things get worse” — I can ask myself, not “what happens next?” but rather “what would raise the stakes?”

But mostly I just keep piracy and capering as tesserae in my own aesthetic.

You want more? Here’s a list of Cory’s excellent fiction-writing advice:

• If you don’t like your story, you get stuck more frequently. If you’re stuck, ask yourself what you need in the story to make yourself like it.
• Use a feed reader and consider staying on top of interesting things (including current events) part of your writing job. But be willing to “mark all as read” when you get behind; don’t be perfectionistic about it, or you’ll never keep up with anything.
• If you’re really stuck, changing projects can be a good strategy.
• Write down little bits of things that interest you, and have a good storage system.
• Get away from any ceremonial ritual for writing. You will become dependent on the ritual.
• Freewriting about whatever is blocking you works well. The shortest path between thought A and thought B, according to some science article or other, is writing it down.
• Subjunctive sentence constructions, dreams sequences, telephone conversations, &tc. generally don’t have as much power as showing situations actually happening to characters face-to-face.
• Time management: use Getting Things Done.
• When you’re stuck, look back at what you wrote earlier. You’ll often discover or remember stuff you were thinking earlier that you can use to go forward.
• Use descriptive filenames if guidelines for electronic submissions ask for attachments.
• The central conceit of a story sometimes doesn’t even show up until a story has gone through multiple drafts. Be willing to revise extensively.
• You stop having writer’s block when writing becomes your job.
• The main thing is believing in yourself.

This post is the fifth in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop (Wikipedia) as a member of the 2008 class. I’ll talk about my...

To write by computer or by hand — or by typewriter? Writers love to talk about their choices, but at the same time they tend to remain uncomfortable with each alternative, regardless of brainy stuff phenomenologists say. Ultimately, whatever works best for you is what works best for you; I’m not here to insist on anything. But if you write, you might benefit from trying my method.

Writers who use computers sometimes talk about their nostalgia for, and fantasies about, typewriters’ plentiful white space — or the white space of any blank sheet of paper. As in a purely empty page: as in the opposite of Microsoft Word’s space-eating toolbars, dancing paperclips, and squiggly red lines underneath your artsy grammar and underneath words your software simply doesn’t recognize. True, you can turn off many of these word processor impositions (surprising as it may be to geeks, lots of writers aren’t aware of those settings). But some impositions — whether in MS Word or other word processors — stay put, cluttering up your screen and distracting you. Ah, but you say you’re invincible against clutter’s powers of distraction? I suggest you actually try a text-editor’s blank screen for a while before you assume clutter doesn’t mess with your story headspace.

What’s a text-editor, you say?

Text-editors are software programs designed specifically for composing text — not for producing images and tables and bullet points and dancing paperclips alongside words. If you don’t want to abandon the way computers allow you to move text around quicker than longhand, or the way computers allow you to get your thoughts down faster than a cramping hand, use a text-editor (I use TextPad). Word processors are at root text-editors combined (often poorly!) with elements of graphic design programs. But text-editors combine the advantages of a computer without the disadvantages of word processors; you can think of text-editors as high-tech typewriters.

In a Locus Magazine article titled “Writing the Age of Distraction,” Cory Doctorow advocates text-editors against word processors:

Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don’t write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they’re at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can’t transmit a virus.

Below, compare a screenshot of a typical MS Word configuration with a screenshot of TextPad, both using text from the beginning of my (free!) short story “Glenn of Green Gables.”

TextPad:

Microsoft Word:

As you can see, TextPad shows merely one thin menu bar at the top; the rest is empty space for you to dive into. MS Word surrounds your screen, and thus your headspace, with distractions.

My text-editor gives me an additional benefit: when I set TextPad to full-screen, I feel as if associations between my computer and non-creative work and recreation drop away. Let me explain. Robert Olen Butler advises taking advantage of a phenomenon psychologists call “functional fixedness.” From his how-to fiction-writing book From Where You Dream:

That is, if you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task.

Partly I regard my computer and desk as a place where I check email, stare at Twitter, what have you; partly, it isn’t a place to get ‘in the zone’ for creative writing. For a while I thought that maybe I could use two computers and two locatons — one for creative work and the other for non-creative work and recreation — but that wasn’t practical. However, everytime I work creatively in a text-editor, I feel as if I’m in a different world, far away from a tempting taskbar or, god forbid, a dancing paperclip.

EPILOGUE: Minor tech notes for new users of TextPad and other text-editors:

• Text-editors save documents as .txt files in either UNIX-based or PC-based format (your choice); many programs on whatever platform read either format sufficiently well (so the formats are largely interchangable); but, if you run into a problem with something somewhere (such as with tagcloud.pl), try saving your .txt file in the other format. Microsoft stuff uses the PC-based format; Macintosh and UNIX-based programs (including operating systems such as Linux) prefer the UNIX-based .txt format.
• In TextPad, pressing Alt+V followed by an “F” keystroke will give you a full-screen view, but you might have to adjust your Windows taskbar first (by right-clicking it and changing options on the Properties menu) in order for it to disappear beneath Textpad’s blessed blank screen.
• In TextPad, an F11 keystroke will give you a sidebar where you can select between multiple files. I find this useful when I write sections of a creative work out of order.
• In TextPad, pressing Alt+C followed by a “W” keystroke will force the program to word-wrap your text automatically, which is what you want.
• You can and should change many of TextPad’s default settings, such as for font size, to your liking.

To write by computer or by hand — or by typewriter? Writers love to talk about their choices, but at the same time they tend to remain uncomfortable with each...

DFW.com, a print and online magazine based in Dallas-Fort Worth, just published a story about me and other artists — singer Tatiana Mayfield, actor Brian Daniels, and painter (and personal friend) James Lassen — working during the recession.

The interview and photo-shoot experiences were really fun. I’m glad people are paying attention to local artists during a time when not many are. DFW.com is a fun site — you should check it out anyway; my girlfriend Kate and I found a really cool hangout, Gallery Art Cafe, through DFW.com’s highly searchable directory of local restaurants.

DFW.com, a print and online magazine based in Dallas-Fort Worth, just published a story about me and other artists — singer Tatiana Mayfield, actor Brian Daniels, and painter (and personal...

This post is the third in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. I’ll talk about the first week of the workshop, when Paul Park instructed. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. I ended Part 2 by saying that at the mysterious space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, where the workshop is held, I started the first week proper by thinking about characterization.

Because characterization is what Paul Park began by talking about.
Paul, a tall, fit guy, struck me and others as confident and intense. Among other books, he’s written the Roumania Quartet novels and the short story collection If Lions Could Speak. He seemed very much a ‘thinker’, and that partly explains why I could easily relate to him and what he had to say. Since it was only the first week of the workshop, no one had turned any stories in; so, instead of the Milford story-critiquing method that drove the workshop through weeks 2 to 6, Paul lectured — mostly in a Socratic way. Sometimes he used exercises he asked us to hand in as the basis for his lectures.

Paul said that on the whole, our Clarion submission stories, while packed with whizbang ideas, didn’t make him invest in the characters strongly enough. So throughout the week he gave us a bunch of tips about characterization and other aspects of fiction-writing. I can tell you without looking at my notes what tips Paul gave that stuck with me the most. Bear in mind I’m paraphrasing.

• Story events happen because of the way people (the characters) are; writers shouldn’t just construct plots and then shoehorn characters in.
• Compressing the timespan of a short story can often give it more ‘kinetic energy.’ Classical unities and whatnot.
• Too frequently, writers use point-of-view characters’ physiological reactions as a shortcut attempt to convey emotion. For example — and this my example, not Paul’s — all too often writers trying to evoke, say, fear, strew sentences such as “Her scalp tingled” and “Her scalp prickled” and “Her scalp tightened” across even just a single short story. The physiological reactions become unintentionally comical (or annoying) tics. You start to wonder if the scalp-y character simply needs a different type of shampoo. The best book I ever read about representing emotion in fiction without resorting to cliches, by the way, was Ann Hood‘s Creating Character Emotions. I have no idea why that book doesn’t get more attention. Most fiction-writing books are nearly useless; Ann Hood’s isn’t.
• Many writers, trying to convey what secondary characters feel, rely far too much on simply reporting the characters’ facial expressions. Sometimes that’s necessary, but conveying what secondary characters feel is (often) a lot more effective when the characters simply do things. Example — and again this is my example, not Paul’s — instead of “her eyes were ablaze with anger” why not “she picked up the baseball bat and pointed its business end at me as though the bat were a sword”? To me, fictional facial expressions are the most obnoxious when writers use eyes to relay to readers what secondary characters feel. How many times have you read “Her eyes were ablaze with anger” in your favorite airport novel?
  
  Sometimes in real life people do communicate startling things exclusively with their eyes, and it’s such an intense experience that cliche sentences don’t do it justice. Oh, and check this out, the study of eye contact is called oculesics. I gotta learn more about them thar oculesics, but I can’t find much written on the subject, can’t find any sort of expert oculesics-ist (or whatever). So for now I simply stare at people and ask them what we’re feeling. People don’t take it too kindly.

The collection of fiction-writing tips I come home from the space station with wasn’t at all the point. The entire workshop process improved my writing and me in ways a list of tips can’t convey. The whole process seemed a sort of artsy group therapy, centered around words and storytelling, both of which have a great deal to do with how people mature and generate meaning. Somewhere therein lies the key to what Clarion West meant. At the time, though, I was far too busy to ask myself what the heck Clarion West was adding up to — the Apollo astronauts generally say the same thing about when they went to outer space: ‘We were too busy picking up rocks and setting down experiment packages to write poems about our feelings.’

This post is the third in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. I’ll talk about the first week of the workshop, when...